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Comment by rottencupcakes | Hacker News Reader

While I understand how voters often want "public accountability" and itemized breakdowns of state budget, something like this seems like a mistake.

There was another thread on the front page earlier today about why companies keep salaries very private. There are reasons why private companies do that. Forcing a government institution to publish these like this must make for interesting inter office politics.

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My salary is in a database just like this at a newspaper in another state.

Big deal.

I am a public employee. The public can, does and should know my salary. If they don't think I'm worth it, they (the public) should fire me.

Are you a finance academic? (username + public employee)

I disagree (but I don't think your comment is worthy of downvotes). For instance, you and your hypothetical school-age children know the most about relative teacher quality within their schools outside of the schools themselves. Presumably, relative quality should be proportional to relative pay. Many people call asking us[1] to list only positions and salaries and leave the names out, but without having the names of employees, there's no way for you to see how effectively your tax dollars are getting spent in the ways that affect you the most. The only real harm done is to the ability of the government to underpay people. There's also the embarrassment some people feel when their friends and family find out their salary, but given a job title, you can guess someone's salary with sufficient accuracy.

Tools like this allow citizens to find out if exceptional employees receive relatively exceptional pay, and if certain positions are over- or underpaid in general. There is actual virtue in these tools, though admittedly most of our hits probably come from the salaciousness factor.

[1] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...

We only want "accountability" because they can't be trusted to do the right thing otherwise.

There was an article in the Washington Post (I think) about this very topic. It really is a harm to morale.

As a CA taxpayer, it certainly harms my morale.

Cheers, Carson

Morale wouldn't be undermined if wages were fair and rules around raises applied predictably.

It's when someone gets bumped to the next pay grade without merit that you're going to get sour grapes among those not as fortunate.

Pay me $48/hour to camp behind an overpass with a box of donuts and a radar gun and I'll probably get over it.

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